Vehicle telematics and infotainment units provide a variety of options for communication with external devices. Telematics units provide connectivity to resources remote from a vehicle, and infotainment systems can be provided with transceivers for localized wireless communication.
Because of the variety of available communication resources, the integration of brought-in devices has increased rapidly in the vehicular space. Application programming interfaces have been provided by vehicle manufacturers, allowing integration of applications running on remote devices with the vehicle systems. At the same time, device technology continues to progress, and there is a strong desire to continue compatibility with new portable devices, as well as to leverage any capability those devices might provide over previously developed portable devices.
These devices include, but are not limited to, wearable devices such as smart watches. These wearables may have the native capability to provide heart rate and other biometric feedback information, as a function of being worn by a user.
One illustrative interaction with a medical device (which may be more complex than the wearables) includes determining a user account associated with a vehicle occupant. The method also includes detecting the presence of at least one active monitoring device. The method further includes determining an association between the active monitoring device and the user account and periodically downloading device information from the active monitoring device to a vehicle computing system. Finally, the method includes storing downloaded device information in association with the user account.